Kaleideoscope
by Halfwest
Summary: A day in the life of Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of Madness. One of the darker days.


**Kaleideoscope**

_Author's Note: This story was written around the settings of Oblivion, but the timeline is not specified and you may assume that it took place at any point that suits your fancy. The ruined temple described as somewhere within sight of the Imperial City is my own invention. If there are any ruins in the game that might roughly correspond, that's nifty, but I don't know about them. ;) Perhaps more importantly, while the story is set around the time and places of Oblivion, the Sheogorath you see here is as he appears in Morrowind. The somewhat more apparently stable persona.

* * *

_

_Dear daddy,  
I know the thing with feathers. I studied it  
intimately  
the time it smashed into a windowpane I happened  
to have been looking out of at the time.  
I was pouring a cup of tea, and it slid down and  
splashed  
into the pot,  
and tea forever after tasted of cherries and forgetting and  
just a little bit  
of the way empty rooms smelled  
when I was five years old and almost as small  
as the little body floating broken in the steaming muddy mixture  
turning it from chocolate to auburn.  
It was a good tea, but I fear  
the view from the window  
was never quite the same.  
Love for-  
ever,  
L_

--from a crumpled note found in an abandoned squatter's tent in Shornhelm, High Rock, sent as a curiosity to a certain soldier in the Imperial Guard stationed in the Imperial City, Cyrodiil, and subsequently lost to an unexpected gust of wind during a fierce rainstorm.

* * *

**I.**  
Once upon a time, she had been a bright, bubbling little girl who had come a long way, a very long way. But it had been a long time, a very long time since then. Now the fair hair had darkened, and the fine, birdboned features had become sunken eyes and a sharp-angled face clothed in skin too used to huddling against her bones for what little warmth was still in her spirit. She had been on this corner since before she first bled, and she knew it well, and it knew her… intimately. She had always managed to make a living here, doing what she did. She was not old. She had many good, strong years in her. She was still fine to look at, her skin still smooth enough for lonely hands.

She had been feeling… tired. Just tired, lately. Still, she thought—it was the bad food, the bad company, the bad _life_ that did it. She'd be all right, just like always. In a few weeks, maybe, when this hot summer settles down and the harvest comes and the soldiers are feeling fat and careless and generous…

She'd been on this corner for a very long time. It had seen her in worse states than just a little weariness. She'd forget all about it once she had company to entertain in the way only she could. So out she was, posing in the shadows, making automatic eyes at a few of her special friends in the Imperial Guard who were less eager to lock them up and spoil their fun. Still, she must have been more tired than she thought, because she didn't seen _him_ before he spoke to her from just beyond the little curve in the side of the wall where the dark got just a little deeper.

"You've got an extra seat at the table tonight?"

She smiled at him. "There's wine and sugar but if you want bread, you'll have to pay extra."

"I think," he said quietly, "that will be quite acceptable." Ooh, this one would be a lot of fun, she could tell. His voice was like molasses.

"Come on out and let me get a look at you." She obligingly shimmied into the lamplight herself, knowing just how to show herself off from the best angles, coupling the pale glow of skin with the promise of more.

He did as she did, and she wondered how she had gotten so lucky this evening. How had the other girls missed this one? He was a _gentleman_, all right. No, not a noble. Not one of those nose-up hoarders from up near the castle. He looked no better off than the innkeepers who kept the stables outside town. It was the way he wore his simple clothing, the way he carried himself—as if he had every right to be what he was and knew it, just like she did—and that cane. She almost giggled when he knocked it against the cobblestones and made her a little bow. He did it all so well, she had no doubt he meant it.

He followed her into her little shack. She had a bed, a cupboard for her food, a dresser for her clothes, a locked chest for her few somewhat nicer things. Wine on a table always set for two, but a bed no one ever slept in twice. Except for her. She kept it well enough for what she was, even had some blossoms set on the carefully-made bedsheets. It may be burlap, but at least it was clean and cared for. She sidled towards the cupboard for the promised sugar, but he took her hand and held her back, pulled her closer. She smiled. Well, it saved her the trouble of having to dish out small talk laced with innuendo until he was sufficiently tipsy and in the mood.

"So what's your name, sweetheart?" She allowed him to ease her down onto the bed. It was all right, she was just so tired.

He told her, murmuring in that almost shy honey voice.

"Oh!" she breathed, matching the volume of her voice to his. "That was my father's name!"

He shook his head with amused disbelief at the coincidence (or was it something else?) and laid a hand on her brow. His fingers were so… delightfully cool. Yes, delightfully cool. She hadn't realized how hot it was until now. "You're gonna be good for me," she purred. "Been a long time since I had a real gentleman."

"I know." He pressed gently until she let her head fall back onto the pillow. "Now… tell me about your father."

* * *

**II.**  
They had all been starting supper when the knocker had sounded on the huge, heavy oak doors. Up the stairs and two rooms away, but the stone walls had a way of carrying sound into the corners and gathering echoes like cobwebs. Vella, the youngest of Mara's priestesses, was up out of her seat and rushing to answer. She was back barely a minute later, breathlessly at the side of her superior.

"Mother," she panted. "There is a gentleman at the door. With a woman. He must see you. It is urgent."

The high priestess met the eyes of the girl—barely sixteen years old, she had entered their temple to be trained as a healer only a few weeks ago, and still wore her robes awkwardly and had not yet perfected the subtle art of fastening the laces on the sides or the pins in her hood properly. But for all her sloppiness, she was honest and dedicated and _sensible._ She knew when an interruption was worth the attention of her elders.

With a nod, the high priestess stood. "Vella, you come with me. Perine, you also. The rest of you, please finish your meal." Perine was an experienced midwife. At the mention of a _gentleman_, the head priestess could not help but assume what was normal for _gentlemen_ delivering women after sunset.

Yet both the high priestess and Perine were surprised by what they saw. A young man, dressed not as a noble, but only in clothing fit for a common merchant. Simple, but… yes, Vella had been right to call him a gentleman. He held a woman in his arms. She looked his elder by perhaps a decade, but was a ragged, underfed thing. Her belly held no child—nor, by the look of her, anything else in a good long while. Her eyes were wide, darting here and there, and she babbled constantly in a rough whisper.

"Sir?" the head priestess greeted him. "Follow me. There is a bed down this hall. Tell me what is the matter. Haste!"

Cradling the woman carefully, he followed. "She is taken with a sickness in her blood," he said in a quiet, smooth voice. "She has not long to live."

"You know this?" the high priestess said shortly as she unlocked the door to one of several spare rooms the temple kept. The main hospital area was too far for them to take her now. "You are a healer? Who is she?"

"You might call me that," the stranger answered with a tilted smirk as he laid her down. He was gentle, at least. In a way only practiced healers are. "But she is beyond the frugal kindness there is to be had where she comes from, and beyond the skills of any healer. Her name is Genna. She is my sister."

None of the three priestesses believed that, but neither did he show even the slightest signs of being her lover. She was not so much older that he might have been her son. There was no chance she could be his daughter. It was possible he was only a concerned stranger. The woman herself was beyond telling them, lying as she was on the bed rolling her body slowly to and fro, whispering about boats.

"How long has she been like this?" Perine asked, kneeling by the bedside and feeling for a fever.

"Not long. Not long at all, no. She is fortunate… her mind broke before she realized her body was breaking."

"A mercy that is," Perine sighed.

"A bitter one indeed," the high priestess said solemnly.

The woman giggled and clutched at the bedsheets. The gentleman watched with an unchanging face, frozen in an expression of acceptance. "She does not have long to live," he continued calmly, "as your healers will discover when you examine her. Days, at best. She will take little of your precious pantry, but here." Onto the corner of the bed he dropped a sack the women had not seen him carrying. "A competent alchemist among you should be able to make her a potion from that to relieve the worst of her symptoms. She feels no pain, but it will make the body's passing gentler. There should be more than enough for… as long as she needs it."

At a gesture from the high priestess, Vella picked up the bag, trying to hide the trembling of her hands. She tore her eyes away from the mad woman only to find herself engulfed by the gaze of the stranger. What she saw in his stare was not a young merchant concerned for his sister's illness. She prayed silently to Mara that she never learned what it was she saw there, and without warning, fled the room. The high priestess twisted her lips into a scowl, but Perine clicked her tongue sympathetically. "Poor lass, she's never seen anything like this before."

Neither of them saw the smile that lapped over his lips. It was gone by the time he turned towards them again. "I cannot stay," he said. "But take care of her. She took care of me." He bowed to them. "I can show myself out."

As he walked from the room, the wild-eyed woman grinned past the doorway. "Daddy's takin' the ship out today," she sang, "daddy's sailing, sailing, we're gonna find the land where sand is sweet sugar on the beach, we're gonna find, find, find. Bye-bye, daddy."

She alone saw the shadowed figure, backlit by hallway torches, as he turned half-way into a silhouette. And she alone heard him answer, somehow the whisper cutting through the hen-cackling fussing of the high priestess and Perine. "Good luck, little girl."

* * *

**III.**  
"Hello, little girl."

Vella jerked her head up, hand over her mouth as the scream she would have given caught itself in the middle of a sob and made her reply a fit of tearful coughing as she scrambled to her feet, holding the bag of alchemical ingredients to her chest. Mama had warned her about meeting strange men in darkness, and she knew even if she could scream, there was no one who could hear her from out in the garden.

Yet there was nothing inherently threatening in the way the gentleman took a slow step towards her, his shape mottled in the dim moonlight shining through the tree leaves. No, nothing _threatening._ But there was something about him she could not define through any experience she had ever had. Perhaps it was the sheer unexpectedness of his levelheaded strength in the face of such horror. How far had he carried that woman, raving and drooling and clutching as she was? How much worse must it have been to have seen what she was like before?

"Why are you weeping?" the gentle voice asked as Vella caught her breath. The question seemed so oddly out of place, she could not answer right away, but continued to grope her way vaguely backwards towards… well, at least away from him. She did not get far. Her heel struck against the gnarled roots of a pruned bush, behind which was the garden wall. She had nowhere to go. She stood staring at him, too frightened to feel ashamed of her tears.

He stepped a little closer. But only a little. He approached the way a curious cat might, wary but intrigued of a stranger holding out a treat. He gave the impression of wanting a better look at her, head tilted at an angle, a hand on his hip as he tapped his cane against his boot. "Why do you weep?" he repeated. And it was not the kind of question asked by sympathetic strangers wondering about the well-being of a distraught young girl. It was… the kind of question asked by someone who sincerely fails to comprehend the motives behind an action. Or indeed, the nature of the action itself.

She could not gather her mind to answer such a thing, but wiped her eyes with a sleeve and sniffed and countered with a question of her own. "How can you just look at her like that?" she demanded angrily. "How can you just… _look_ at how much she's suffering and not care at all?"

She saw him raise his brows in the moonlight. "She is happy," he replied in that calm, silky tone. "She believes she is a young girl again, watching her father's boat sail. Possibly she thinks she has a sweetroll in her hand. She can even taste it. It is a cool autumn day and the world is full of songs and bounty. I assure you, she is not suffering."

Vella shook her head violently. "She is… she's…" There were no words for what it felt like, to look upon such a broken creature.

The man reached up to a low branch of the tree, tugged it downwards and rubbed a soft leaf between his fingers for a few seconds before letting it go. He said nothing, but there was an air of patient expectancy. Vella took a deep breath, forcing herself to be calm. "She's not really your sister, is she?"

The stranger met her eyes. Vella looked away quickly. "No," he said.

"Is… is she your wife?"

"No." He sounded amused. "Keep guessing."

"Is she your mistress?" the girl stammered, feeling her cheeks redden.

The stranger laughed. "No. I will tell you, if it will comfort you. That woman is a whore, as common as they come. If she had not come here, she would have died, alone and in great pain, in a shack with no address, and no one would know of her passing until the smell alerted the Guard, or an unlucky thief came upon her."

Vella forced herself to look at him again, though not into his eyes. "Did you do that to her?" she asked, fierce through her terror.

"Do what?" the stranger asked. "Make her sick? No again. Stop looking for reasons to blame me, child. I gave her mercy the rest of the world denied her all her short life. In one more day, she would have realized she was dying. She would have died of despair before her illness took her. Is there a worse way to die?" His voice hardened a little. "To languish in a darkness that has no end but oblivion, to feel acutely as your flesh rots on your bones, to be a captive of your own demise…" His voice cracked. He stopped, closed his eyes, bowed his head. "In her madness, she is spared that anguish," he said, calm once more. "She will live the rest of her short days questing for goals and glories which no one else can see. But she will have them. She will have _life_, if only in dreams. She will at least have dreams."

Vella hugged her shoulders. "Don't you pity her?" she asked softly.

The stranger shot her a skewed smile. "There are many who would envy her. You would do well to consider whether you might not welcome such a release when your own time comes."

"Never," Vella insisted. "I would rather be tortured to death than lose myself."

He shrugged. "Yet in the face of what you feared, you ran."

Vella opened her mouth to argue, but found she had no words. He chuckled softly. "Do not be so quick to discount the value of what you call running away. I call it an opportunity for a new approach." He waved his cane towards her bag. "You needn't anchor yourself to the bedsides of the infirm in order to give them aid and comfort. There is a mortar and pestle on the wall just over there. You might consider trying." He turned to leave.

"Wait!" Vella called. "Who are you?"

But the footsteps went silent, and she was alone. Thoroughly baffled, Vella looked down at the bag in her hand. She was indeed an alchemist of some skill. If these were plants she knew, she could even try to improve upon their effects. She tugged loose the drawstring and opened the cloth.

Inside was a short length of tangled string, a small head of brown and wilted lettuce, a stone that looked like it had been picked up from the road that ran past the temple, and a piece of grubby, crumpled parchment rolled messily into something like a scroll.

_**The Spirit's Treason** _

And then, with a crash and a bang and a night without wishes, the singing was over. It left without consolation or apology, and the whole of the dark, wild world fell into a sleep from which there would be no waking, and so, contain no dreams. A deep sleep, a sterile sleep, much more than a winter: a damnation. The flocks huddled flightless, the grey heather withered, the leaves of the grass bowed in mourning, laid down in the dust. The passive landscape yielded to a suggestion from a passing gypsy wind: its spirit abandoned its ties to the homeland and left it to fallow in the cultivation of abandonment—the only crop that could flourish in the songless ruin.

The writing was faded and blotchy, as if its author had been using something other than a proper pen. Below, less faded and in a different hand, was a note:

_Better to abandon what you thought was essential than to let its failure destroy you._

And below that, a word she could not make out in the dim moonlight.

Vella rolled the parchment neatly and replaced it in the bag. Above, a roll of distant thunder sounded. With a quiet blasphemous murmur, she headed back towards the Temple's doors, preparing herself for the bombardment of the woman's babbling. But when she opened the door, all was silent. The halls were dark but for a single torch burning near the door. Perhaps they had taken the woman to the real hospital wing. Yet she could hear no chatter from the other priestesses finishing their meal. Surely they could not have been done so quickly? Had she been outside longer than she thought? A glance at the moon told her no, she had not been out longer than an hour. She slipped inside, took the torch, and hastened towards the dining hall. Down the stairs, through the arches… but the room was silent, dark, deserted. On the table were a few unused items of dishware and utensils scattered with no evidence of design in their placement. Vella hurried past them, past the silent pantry, past the cellar door, into the kitchen. This, too, was dark and empty and silent but for the muffled patter of rain outside. No dishes in the sink. No sign of a recent meal. No evidence that anyone had been here recently at all. Vella walked in a daze down the aisle between the long carving table and the sink counter, towards the nook at the far end of the room where the grain sacks were kept.

There she stopped and stood still as death.

There were indeed, in the little alcove, a couple of old grain sacks. They had been altered into a makeshift bed. Scattered around them was something like a campsite: candles, clothing neatly folded and arranged, books stacked into a makeshift table upon which sat several sheets of paper, a pen and inkwell. A piece of dry cheese on a plate, and a dented cup that still held a little of the stale beer she had brought up from the racks in the cellar.

Vella stepped carefully over the open books and sat down on the grain sacks, which felt as if they had been stuffed with more clothes. She noticed the cloth that fell over her knees. It may have once been a white priestess's robe, but it was very old, tattered and ripped, and looked as if it hadn't been washed in… months, probably. Looked and _smelled._

Vella calmly set the torch into the notch in the alcove, which supported its flame above her as she opened the sack again and took out the parchment. A sudden clap of thunder made her jump and drop the bag, spilling its contents at her feet. She breathed. She unrolled the document. She squinted at the word scrawled at the bottom, puzzling its letters into sounds and trying them out on her tongue.

"_Wabbajack… wabbajack… wabbajack…_"

She closed her eyes. The thunder roared. Tense seconds passed and were counted by the rain beating on the worn rooftop somewhere far above. Then at last…

"Hello, little girl."

Vella smiled. She didn't need to look to know who was there. She could feel him, light as feathers against her shoulders as she leaned back and settled into the pocket shaped like her spine in the bags of sand. The parchment slipped from her hands as she let her arms fall to her sides and lay limp with her palms up. She could feel him all around her. He was in the sand, the stones. He was standing over her in the torchfire. She could feel the particles of light falling on her and tingling. She laughed delightedly at the sensation. She was floating. She could smell the sweet, clean air above the city. She could feel the rolling mounds of the hills. Her body WAS the hills, she was the land, and the land had feathers. The land was a great squawking thing with feathers stuck out all over like a crow in the rain, and they pressed against her shoulders and slid over her breasts. She could see through her eyelids, the sun's light, he was the sun, he was in the light. She could hear the roar of the wind and the sea and all the world was roaring, joyful, free. She opened her mouth to taste the rain, and it was warm and sweet like the summer teas she had had with her grandmother in Anvil, how pretty it was there! He was the tea. He tasted like bitter herbs and sugar. She laughed aloud, her voice mingling with the roar, the clap, the smash, the rumble. She could feel the rumble in the foundations, shifting the sand beneath her back. She was lying on a cloud beside the sea, and beyond the sea great flocks of birds rose to welcome her. She had feathers, she had moth's wings, she flexed her shoulders as she spread them wide and laughed and cried out to them, to him, to her grandmother waving at her below, and she had never known so much joy…

She was still laughing when the ancient walls were struck by a bolt of lightening and crumbled over her bones. To end it all in such perfect ecstasy.

A bitter mercy, but a mercy nonetheless.

* * *

**IV.**  
On the highest corner of what little remained of the fallen building perched a man, his arms folded over his knees, the heels of his boots wedged against a sharp protruding shard of rock, an ornate walking cane balanced across his lap. Rivers of water flowed through his shaggy hair the color of bright, dusty straw. The rain pasted his loose white shirtsleeves to his arms and darkened the green of his vest almost into black. It fell into his eyes and ran down his cheeks and caught the light in glimpses of broken sparkles in his stubbly beard. He wore an expression of intense discontent, his lips pursed very nearly into a pout, his brows creased and his eyes in shadow. He would not even grant a smile to the lightening crackling over the clouds and tickling the air with static all around him. He did not move to lean into the wind, he did not blink when the skies flashed blindingly. His eyes, hard with the weight of Being and with the determination to continue doing so, pierced the rain and focused vaguely on the distant spire rising high over the river valley, over the white walls turned grey by the curtain of water. It was an awkward sort of look for him: at war with the basic nonthreatening form he chose to assume, there was a depth and danger that burned in his eyes. He couldn't help it, funerals always made him maudlin.

Something had to be done, he thought decisively, or he was in very real danger of becoming depressed. The big city could always be relied upon to cheer him up. He hadn't paid a visit in far too long. He would have to drop in and see what opportunities there were to be had.

But not before he was through sulking.

He could do a very, very good sulk when he put his mind to it. Had there been anyone to watch, they could have asked for no better demonstration. A pity their notes would have been ruined by the storm.

But all storms pass in time, this one no differently. The lightening dimmed and faded, the thunder grew less frequent, until at last all that remained was a pillowy pale-grey sky drizzling sulkily at the landscape. The man on the wall gave a great sniff, sighed, scrubbed his face with his damp sleeves, and glanced once more at the settled heap of rubble beneath which, from some miraculously sheltered corner, some smoldering flame sent up a thin stream of black smoke. The last words of the passing storm echoed in a faint rumble, a halfhearted declaration of "the end" given as an afterthought. Time to go. He lifted his gaze to the spire, took his cane in his hand, and slid down from the wall.


End file.
